15 September 2018 10:00 AM

Saturday PS: Feel free to dissonate

For example, your neighbour, over a cup of coffee or a mug of beer, professes to believe that the police force is not only useless but entirely indifferent to the needs of the public it is supposed to be serving.

You point out, as gently as possible, that your neighbour’s own experience entirely contradicts this view. When his house was burgled, local detectives worked round the clock, without extra pay, to track down the offenders, take them to court and recover your neighbour’s possessions.

He agrees that this was, indeed, the case.

Hm.

Cognitive dissonance must also surely strike when going from one’s own working environment to another and noticing that many aspects of one’s own workplace, taken for granted, simply do not exist elsewhere.

Imagine an NHS employee – doctor, nurse, other line of work – knocking off and heading for the nearest supermarket. What do they not find?

Staff dressed like guests at a pyjama party, signs everywhere telling people to wash their hands (despite hygiene being equally important in a food store as a clinic or hospital), endless queues, appointments with the deli counter or the in-store bakery running an hour or more late and a doom-laden warning every winter that, in the absence of tens of millions more pounds of taxpayers’ money for the supermarket industry, the nation will starve.

A teacher then arrives for a spot of shopping. What do they not find? Well, members of staff don’t tend to “boycott” aspects of store’s operations to which they have taken an ideological dislike. If they did, they would be fired. Nor do they complain endlessly about “overwork” and stress, although they may well be overworked.

Were they to raise the workload question, it is unlikely they would claim to be doing so in the interests of over-stressed customers as much as in their own interest.

Enter an employee of the railways or Tube. Such a person ought to be immediately struck by the absence of booming, moronic announcements telling people to watch out for slippery services, not to run and always to carry a bottle of water in hot weather.

They should notice also that the store does not routinely open late, close early or shut for periods of the day because of “staff shortages”, “an operating incident” or technical failure. The drivers of the vans that deliver on-line shopping are not paid £70,000-odd for a four-day week.

Rightly or wrongly, strikes are unheard of in the supermarket business.

We were nice about the police earlier. Let’s be a little less so now. What absences does an officer notice on their shopping trip? Well, the first may well be the absence of…absence. There are visible staff everywhere, on the checkouts and on the shop floor.

Then there is no suggestion that, for instance, nine out of ten types of groceries will no longer be stocked and the public will simply have to manage without them. Should people try to grow their own at home, they will be prosecuted.

Again, our law-enforcement visitor may ponder the absence of an alternative range of products to those popular items no longer stocked, products for which there is no demand but displayed at the insistence of senior management in cahoots with taxpayer-funded campaign groups and Government Ministers.

Finally, do you imagine a BBC staff member popping in for a pint of milk or loaf of bread would be puzzled by the supermarket’s ability to operate without a levy of more than £150 a year on every household, regardless of where they shop, avoidance of which is a criminal offence?

In reality, of course, our various shoppers will suffer not a moment’s cognitive dissonance. It does not occur to them that there is anything odd in the gulf between the way their organisations operate and the services they take for granted.

A letter to The Times published on September 7 from Jonathan Rodger, of Morpeth, Northumberland, concluded that “State employees have become an economic caste apart from the rest of us”.

Yes, quite.

Saturday miscellany

TWO health fascists this week resigned from the taxpayer-funded health fascist quango Public Health England on the ground that it is insufficiently health fascistic. Doubtless, some dribbling-idiot “Minister” will pledge to up the fascism count.

Meanwhile, I’ve only just become aware that the 1974 vigilante movie Death Wish has been remade. If any papers still employ an actual crime reporter, as opposed to a lot of cut-price “Millennial” dimwit columnists, may I respectfully suggest that they look out for any homicides in crime-ridden London about which the police seem less than forthcoming. Just saying…

A final word on cognitive dissonance. In the 1979 BBC TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, master-spy George Smiley (Alec Guinness) is in conversation with one-time fellow spook Roy Bland (Terence Rigby).

Bland: “An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function.” Who dreamed that one up?

Smiley: Scott Fitzgerald.

Bland: Well, Fitzgerald knew a thing or two. And I’m definitely functioning. As a good socialist, I’m going where the money is. As a good capitalist, I’m sticking with the revolution.